Childrey tried to speak. His eyes were wide. He coughed, and there was blood in his mouth.

  I guess I froze. How could I help if I couldn't tell what had happened? I saw a blood spot on his right shoulder, and I tore the shirt open and found another tiny puncture wound.

  The doctor arrived.

  It took Childrey an hour to die, but the doctor had given up much earlier. Between the wound in his shoulder and the wound in his thigh, Childrey's flesh had been ruptured in a narrow line that ran through one lung and his stomach and part of his intestinal tract. The autopsy showed a tiny, very neat hole drilled through the hipbones.

  We looked for, and found, a hole in the floor beneath the communicator. It was the size of a pencil lead, and packed with dust.

  "I made a mistake," Lear told the rest of us at the inquest. "I should never have touched that particular button. It must have switched off the fields that held the mass in place. It just dropped. Captain Childrey was underneath."

  And it had gone straight through him, eating the mass of him as it went.

  "No, not quite," said Lear. "I'd guess it massed about 10^14 grams. That only makes it 10^-6 Angstrom across, much smaller than an atom. It wouldn't have absorbed much. The damage was done to Childrey by tidal effects as it passed through him. You saw how it pulverized the material of the floor."

  Not surprisingly, the subject of murder did come up.

  Lear shrugged it off. "Murder with what? Childrey didn't believe there was a black hole in there at all. Neither did many of you." He smiled suddenly. "Can you imagine what the trial would be like? Imagine the prosecuting attorney trying to tell a jury what he thinks happened. First he's got to tell them what a black hole is. Then a quantum black hole. Then he's got to explain why he doesn't have the murder weapon, and where he left it, freely falling through Mars! And if he gets that far without being laughed out of court, he's still got to explain how a thing smaller than an atom could hurt anyone!"

  But didn't Dr. Lear know the thing was dangerous? Could he not have guessed its enormous mass from the way it behaved?

  Lear spread his hands. "Gentlemen, we're dealing with more variables than just mass. Field strength, for instance. I might have guessed its mass from the force it took to keep it there, but did any of us expect the aliens to calibrate their dials in the metric system?"

  Surely there must have been safeties to keep the fields from being shut off accidentally. Lear must have bypassed them.

  "Yes, I probably did, accidentally. I did quite a lot of fiddling to find out how things worked."

  It got dropped there. Obviously there would be no trial. No ordinary judge or jury could be expected to understand what the attorneys would be talking about. A couple of things never did get mentioned.

  For instance: Childrey's last words. I might or might not have repeated them if I'd been asked to. They were: "All right, show me! Show it to me or admit it isn't there!"

  * * *

  As the court was breaking up I spoke to Lear with my voice lowered. "That was probably the most unique murder weapon in history."

  He whispered, "If you said that in company I could sue for slander."

  "Yeah? Really? Are you going to explain to a jury what you think I implied happened?"

  "No, I'll let you get away with it this time."

  "Hell, you didn't get away scot-free yourself. What are you going to study now? The only known black hole in the universe, and you let it drop through your fingers."

  Lear frowned. "You're right. Partly right, anyway. But I knew as much about it as I was going to, the way I was going. Now ... I stopped it vibrating in there, then took the mass of the entire setup with the Forward Mass Sensor. Now the black hole isn't in there anymore. I can get the mass of the black hole by taking the mass of the communicator alone."

  "Oh."

  "And I can cut the machine open, see what's inside. How they controlled it. Damn it, I wish I were six years old."

  "What? Why?"

  "Well ... I don't have the times straightened out. The math is chancy. Either a few years from now, or a few centuries, there's going to be a black hole between Earth and Jupiter. It'll be big enough to study. I think about forty years."

  When I realized what he was implying, I didn't know whether to laugh or scream.

  "Lear, you can't think that something that small could absorb Mars!"

  "Well, remember that it absorbs everything it comes near. A nucleus here, an electron there ... and it's not just waiting for atoms to fall into it. Its gravity is ferocious, and it's falling back and forth through the center of the planet, sweeping up matter. The more it eats, the bigger it gets, with its volume going up as the cube of the mass. Sooner or later, yes, it'll absorb Mars. By then it'll be just less than a millimeter across. Big enough to see."

  "Could it happen within thirteen months?"

  "Before we leave? Hm-m-m." Lear's eyes took on a faraway look. "I don't think so. I'll have to work it out. The math is chancy..."

  DOING LENNON

  Gregory Benford

  Sanity calms, but madness

  is more interesting.

  —JOHN RUSSELL

  As the hideous cold seeps from him he feels everything becoming sharp and clear again. He decides he can do it, he can make it work. He opens his eyes.

  “Hello.” His voice rasps. “Bet you aren't expecting me. I'm John Lennon.”

  “What?” the face above him says.

  “You know. John Lennon. The Beatles.”

  Professor Hermann—the name attached to the face which loomed over him as he drifted up, up from the Long Sleep—is vague about the precise date. It is either 2108 or 2180. Hermann makes a little joke about inversion of positional notation; it has something to do with nondenumerable set theory, which is all the rage. The ceiling glows with a smooth green phosphorescence and Fielding lies there letting them prick him with needles, unwrap his organiform nutrient webbing, poke and adjust and massage as he listens to a hollow pock-pocketa . He knows this is the crucial moment, he must hit them with it now.

  “I'm glad it worked,” Fielding says with a Liverpool accent. He has got it just right, the rising pitch at the end and the nasal tones.

  “No doubt there is an error in our log,” Hermann says pedantically. “You are listed as Henry Fielding.”

  Fielding smiles. “Ah, that's the ruse, you see.”

  Hermann blinks owlishly. “Deceiving Immortality Incorporated is—”

  “I was fleeing political persecution, y'dig. Coming out for the workers and all. Writing songs about persecution and pollution and the working-class hero. Snarky stuff. So when the jackboot skinheads came in I decided to check out.”

  Fielding slips easily into the story he has memorized, all plotted and placed with major characters and minor characters and bits of incident, all of it sounding very real. He wrote it himself, he has it down. He continues talking while Hermann and some white-smocked assistants help him sit up, flex his legs, test his reflexes. Around them are vats and baths and tanks. A fog billows from a hole in the floor; a liquid nitrogen immersion bath.

  Hermann listens intently to the story, nodding now and then, and summons other officials. Fielding tells his story again while the attendants work on him. He is careful to give the events in different order, with different details each time. His accent is standing up though there is mucus in his sinuses that makes the high singsong bits hard to get out. They give him something to eat; it tastes like chicken-flavored ice cream. After a while he sees he has them convinced. After all, the late twentieth was a turbulent time, crammed with gaudy events, lurid people. Fielding makes it seem reasonable that an aging rock star, seeing his public slip away and the government closing in, would corpsicle himself.

  The officials nod and gesture and Fielding is wheeled out on a carry table. Immortality Incorporated is more like a church than a business. There is a ghostly hush in the hallways, the attendants are distant and reserved. Scientific servants in the temple of life.

  They take him to an elaborate display, punch a button. A voice begins to drone a welcome to the year 2018 (or 2180). The voice tells him he is one of the few from his benighted age who saw the slender hope science held out to the diseased and dying. His vision has been rewarded. He has survived the unfreezing. There is some nondenominational talk about God and death and the eternal rhythm and balance of life, ending with a retouched holographic photograph of the Founding Fathers. They are a small knot of biotechnicians and engineers clustered around an immersion tank. Close-cropped hair, white shirts with ball-point pens clipped in the pockets. They wear glasses and smile weakly at the camera, as though they have just been shaken awake.

  “I'm hungry,” Fielding says.

  * * *

  News that Lennon is revived spreads quickly. The Society for Dissipative Anachronisms holds a press conference for him. As he strides into the room Fielding clenches his fists so no one can see his hands shaking. This is the start. He has to make it here.

  “How do you find the future, Mr. Lennon?”

  “Turn right at Greenland.” Maybe they will recognize it from A Hard Day's Night . This is before his name impacts fully, before many remember who John Lennon was. A fat man asks Fielding why he elected for the Long Sleep before he really needed it and Fielding says enigmatically, “The role of boredom in human history is underrated.” This makes the evening news and the weekly topical roundup a few days later.

  A fan of the twentieth asks him about the breakup with Paul, whether Ringo's death was a suicide, what about Allan Klein, how about the missing lines from Abbey Road ? Did he like Dylan? What does he think of the Aarons theory that the Beatles could have stopped Vietnam?

  Fielding parries a few questions, answers others. He does not tell them, of course, that in the early sixties he worked in a bank and wore granny glasses. Then he became a broker with Harcum, Brandels and Son and his take in 1969 was 57,803 dollars, not counting the money siphoned off into the two concealed accounts in Switzerland. But he read Rolling Stone religiously, collected Beatles memorabilia, had all the albums and books and could quote any verse from any song. He saw Paul once at a distance, coming out of a recording session. And he had a friend into Buddhism, who met Harrison one weekend in Surrey. Fielding did not mention his vacation spent wandering around Liverpool, picking up the accent and visiting all the old places, the cellars where they played and the narrow dark little houses their families owned in the early days. And as the years dribbled on and Fielding's money piled up, he lived increasingly in those golden days of the sixties, imagined himself playing side man along with Paul or George or John and crooning those same notes into the microphones, practically kissing the metal. And Fielding did not speak of his dreams.

  * * *

  It is the antiseptic Stanley Kubrick future. They are very adept at hardware. Population is stabilized at half a billion. Everywhere there are white hard decorator chairs in vaguely Danish modern. There seems no shortage of electrical power or oil or copper or zinc. Everyone has a hobby. Entertainment is a huge enterprise, with stress on ritual violence. Fielding watches a few games of Combat Gold, takes in a public execution or two. He goes to witness an electrical man short-circuit himself. The flash is visible over the curve of the Earth.

  * * *

  Genetic manipulants—manips, Hermann explains—are thin, stringy people, all lines and knobby joints where they connect directly into machine linkages. They are designed for some indecipherable purpose. Hermann, his guide, launches into an explanation but Fielding interrupts him to say, “Do you know where I can get a guitar?”

  Fielding views the era 1950-1980:

  “Astrology wasn't rational, nobody really believed it, you've got to realize that. It was boogie woogie . On the other hand, science and rationalism were progressive jazz.”

  He smiles as he says it. The 3D snout closes in. Fielding has purchased well and his plastic surgery, to lengthen the nose and give him that wry Lennonesque smirk, holds up well. Even the technicians at Immortality Incorporated missed it.

  * * *

  Fielding suffers odd moments of blackout. He loses the rub of rough cloth at a cuff on his shirt, the chill of air-conditioned breeze along his neck. The world dwindles away and sinks into inky black, but in a moment it is all back and he hears the distant murmur of traffic, and convulsively, by reflex, he squeezes the bulb in his hand and the orange vapor rises around him. He breathes deeply, sighs. Visions float into his mind and the sour tang of the mist reassures him.

  Every age is known by its pleasures, Fielding reads from the library readout. The twentieth introduced two: high speed and hallucinogenic drugs. Both proved dangerous in the long run, which made them even more interesting. The twenty-first developed weightlessness, which worked out well except for the re-entry problems if one overindulged. In the twenty-second there were aquaform and something Fielding could not pronounce or understand.

  He thumbs away the readout and calls Hermann for advice.

  * * *

  Translational difficulties:

  They give him a sort of pasty suet when he goes to the counter to get his food. He shoves it back at them.

  “Gah! Don't you have a hamburger someplace?” The stunted man behind the counter flexes his arms, makes a rude sign with his four fingers and goes away. The wiry woman next to Fielding rubs her thumbnail along the hideous scar at her side and peers at him. She wears only orange shorts and boots, but he can see the concealed dagger in her armpit.

  “Hamburger?” she says severely. “That is the name of a citizen of the German city of Hamburg. Were you a cannibal then?”

  Fielding does not know the proper response, which could be dangerous. When he pauses she massages her brown scar with new energy and makes a sign of sexual invitation. Fielding backs away. He is glad he did not mention French fries.

  * * *

  On 3D he makes a mistake about the recording date of Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band . A ferret-eyed history student lunges in for the point but Fielding leans back casually, getting the accent just right, and says, “I zonk my brow with heel of hand, consterned!” and the audience laughs and he is away, free.

  * * *

  Hermann has become his friend. The library readout says this is a common phenomenon among Immortality Incorporated employees who are fascinated by the past to begin with (or otherwise would not be in the business), and anyway Hermann and Fielding are about the same age, forty-seven. Hermann is not surprised that Fielding is practicing his chords and touching up his act.

  “You want to get out on the road again, is that it?” Hermann says. “You want to be getting popular.”

  “It's my business.”

  “But your songs, they are old.”

  “Oldies but goldies,” Fielding says solemnly.

  “Perhaps you are right,” Hermann sighs. “We are starved for variety. The people, no matter how educated—anything tickles their nose they think is champagne.”

  Fielding flicks on the tape input and launches into the hard-driving opening of “Eight Days a Week.” He goes through all the chords, getting them right the first time. His fingers dance among the humming copper wires.

  Hermann frowns but Fielding feels elated. He decides to celebrate. Precious reserves of cash are dwindling, even considering how much he made in the international bond market of ‘83; there is not much left. He decides to splurge. He orders an alcoholic vapor and a baked pigeon. Hermann is still worried but he eats the mottled pigeon with relish, licking his fingers. The spiced crust snaps crisply. Hermann asks to take the bones home to his family.

  * * *

  “You have drawn the rank-scented many,” Hermann says heavily as the announcer begins his introduction. The air sparkles with anticipation.

  “Ah, but they're my many,” Fielding says. The applause begins, the background music comes up, and Fielding trots out onto the stage, puffing slightly.

  “One, two, three—” and he is into it, catching the chords just right, belting out a number from Magical Mystery Tour . He is right, he is on, he is John Lennon just as he always wanted to be. The music picks him up and carries him along. When he finishes, a river of applause bursts over the stage from the vast amphitheater and Fielding grins crazily to himself. It feels exactly the way he always thought it would. His heart pounds.

  He goes directly into a slow ballad from the Imagine album to calm them down. He is swimming in the lights and the 3D snouts zoom in and out, bracketing his image from every conceivable direction. At the end of the number somebody yells from the audience, “You're radiating on all your eigenfrequencies!” And Fielding nods, grins, feels the warmth of it all wash over him.

  “Thrilled to the gills,” he says into the microphone.

  The crowd chuckles and stirs.

  When he does one of the last Lennon numbers, “The Ego-Bird Flies,” the augmented sound sweeps out from the stage and explodes over the audience. Fielding is euphoric. He dances as though someone is firing pistols at his feet.

  He does cuts from Beatles ‘65, Help!, Rubber Soul, Let It Be —all with technical backing spliced in from the original tracks, Fielding providing only Lennon's vocals and instrumentals. Classical scholars have pored over the original material, deciding who did which guitar riff, which tenor line was McCartney's, dissecting the works as though they were salamanders under a knife. But Fielding doesn't care, as long as they let him play and sing. He does another number, then another, and finally they must carry him from the stage. It is the happiest moment he has ever known.

  * * *

  “But I don't understand what Boss 30 radio means,” Hermann says.

  “Thirty most popular songs.”

  “But why today?”

  “Me.”

  “They call you a ‘sonic boom sensation'—that is another phrase from your time?”

 

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